Allen Ginsberg is fat, bearded, and sitting in the interview chair. Long hair grows in unruly patches from the side of his otherwise bald head. His eyebrows sprout from his brow like wild hawthorn in bloom. He’s wearing a tie-dyed t-shirt with a hole in it. His fingers are stained from nicotine resin.

Ginsberg wanted to talk about the generation gap, and what he was saying about the challenges youth had to face actually made a lot of sense.

But nobody could take him seriously. He simply didn’t appear to be a credible expert.

Editor’s note: On August 28, 2014, Google ended their Authorship program. To discover what this means for you as an online content creator, check out this post by Sonia Simone.

Hopefully you’ve already caught the importance of Google Authorship, the mechanism by which Google’s search engine rankings can be influenced by Author Rank.

If you haven’t, Google Authorship basically amounts to the biggest shakeup in search since the link. It’s Google’s way of identifying the author of a piece of content to factor it as a signal of content quality.

We realize that most writers and online publishers don’t have tons of time to sift through excessively geeky posts involving underlying website code (rel= “author” or rel=”me” anyone?).